A painful reminder for Operation Cast Lead remained evident in Gaza in the form of blatant, racist graffiti sprayed on houses' walls by IDF soldiers. Residents of the Zeitun neighborhood who returned to their homes once the fighting in the region was over discovered that their walls had been sprayed with slogans such as "Die you all," Make war not peace," "Death to Arabs," "Arabs must die," and "One down, 999,999 to go."
The IDF is currently conducting an investigation and promises to severely reprimand the ‘offender(s)’ but this smells surprisingly suspicious to me. While I am not suggesting it is out of the realm of possibilities for IDF soldiers to write racist graffiti. Although, this does suggest some Israeli soldiers had far too much time on their hands while allegedly engaged in fighting in hostile fire zone.
What does surprise me is the writers did so in English rather than in Hebrew or Arabic – the two official languages of the state of Israel. Israel does have a rather large well-educated population with a fluency in a multitude of languages but isn’t the point of the alleged soldier’s graffiti meant to convey a message to the predominately Arab residents of the Gaza Strip who overwhelmingly speak and read only in Arabic?
But it does make for a nice photo op for the international press. Let’s call it Pal-ffiti.
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